With all the frills for opening a high interest yielding savings account and liquidity restriction with short-term endowment plans, I feel that investing in the SSB would be the better option.

When Should You Choose One Over the Other?

Whenever this topic gets discussed in our Seedly Community, the majority of us would choose to place our money in SSB over FD. With only a handful of people, would opt for the latter.

Choosing Fixed Deposits

When you need to withdraw the money immediately.

Fixed Deposits allows you to withdraw your money immediately.

SSB requires about 7-30 days to withdraw your money.

When you have a big amount, amount big enough that you are able to negotiate with the bank a higher fixed deposit rate.

The maximum amount of SSB you can hold is $100K across all SSB issues.

For SSB, you might not be allocated the entire amount you opted for.
– Meaning, although you have opted for $10,000 SSB, you might receive only $6,000 worth of SSB allocation.

There is no limit to how much you can hold in Fixed Deposits – however, only $50,000 of your deposit is covered under SDIC.

In the event a Deposit Insurance Scheme member bank or finance company fails, all of your eligible accounts with that member are aggregated and insured up to S$50,000. Trust and client accounts held by non-bank depositors are insured up to $50,000 per account.

Choosing Singapore Savings Bonds

Due to bonds having an inverse relationship with market interest rates, the interest rates offered by the SSB every month are irregular, and because of that sometimes you might feel “short-changed” by your investments.

There are a few ways that you can hack your SSB investments like withdrawing your existing SSB investment to invest in the current month’s SSB if the interest rate offered is higher.